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FILM; Capitalism's Little Tramp

By BRUCE HEADLAM

Published: September 20, 2009

''DO not get out of the car!'' the private security guard barked at the driver from the back seat of a black van carrying Michael Moore and five striking workers from the United Steelworkers union (Local 6500). The event was the screening of Mr. Moore's latest film, ''Capitalism: A Love Story'' at the Toronto International Film Festival and, as with most premieres, the sidewalk was packed with people waiting for the limousine doors to open.

But as the driver pulled the van close enough to the curb to clip the shoulder of a Toronto policeman holding back the surging crowd, it became evident that this crowd wanted more than autographs. There were picketers, homemade protest signs and people dressed as 19th-century robber barons. Even the miners, whom Mr. Moore invited to bring attention to their bitter two-month strike against the mining giant Vale Inco in Sudbury, Ontario, looked wide-eyed at the spectacle last Sunday.

Mr. Moore, a veteran of political action and perhaps the most successful documentary filmmaker in history, had little reason to worry. Getting out of the van, he waded into the crowd and greeted the protesters, whose pitchforks were directed at the bankers and bureaucrats behind last year's huge Wall Street bailout. He then entered the Elgin Theater and introduced the miners (wearing their full work gear) to the news media, the warm mood broken only slightly when a reporter from ''Entertainment Tonight'' asked sarcastically whether Mr. Moore had arrived in a Cadillac.

''I don't notice,'' he said, asking if anyone knew the make.

''Jeez, I think it was a Ford,'' one of the miners said, squinting into the paparazzi flashes that lighted up his face.

Canada has been friendly territory since 1989, when Mr. Moore came to the festival here to hawk his first film, a 16-millimeter documentary called ''Roger & Me,'' about how General Motors abandoned Flint, Mich. Still living on weekly unemployment checks of $98, Mr. Moore was a surprise winner of the festival's People's Choice Award and his unlikely career rise began.

Since then, in films like ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' ''Bowling for Columbine'' and ''Sicko,'' his hulking figure shambling toward company executives and bewildered security guards has become the postindustrial version of Chaplin's Little Tramp. This year's entry is not a sortie on a particular industry; it is a frontal assault on the very idea of American free enterprise -- a beast, he called it in an address to the Toronto audience, ''and you can't tie it down with a flimsy piece of rope.''

For this crowd that is a message that goes down as easily as weak American beer. In the United States Mr. Moore's conservative critics may decry his popularity, but his films and best-selling books are far more popular outside the country, especially in Britain, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan. In such places Mr. Moore has become a kind of anti-cultural ambassador -- the prism through which a large part of the world views the United States.

But a film that flatly concludes that capitalism is evil is certain to put him at odds with most of the left wing in his own country, and even with President Obama, who gave a speech the next day on Wall Street on the need to reregulate, not replace the financial industry.

''I know what I'm facing when I go back across the Blue Water Bridge,'' Mr. Moore told the theater's 1,500 cheering ''socialist Canadians,'' as he called them. After the screening many in the audience looked for ballots to vote again for Mr. Moore's film for the People's Choice Award, which is sponsored by -- who else? -- Cadillac. Your tax dollars at work.

HYPOCRITE. PROPAGANDIST. Egomaniac. Glutton. Exploiter. Embarrassment. Slob. These are a few of the criticisms that have been lobbed at Mr. Moore since his career began, and these are just the ones from liberals.

His arrival with ''Roger & Me'' seemed to crystallize a contradiction in the elite liberal sensibility, one that is still unresolved. Through President Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Whitewater and Kenneth W. Starr, some liberals have craved their own class warrior, a Rush Limbaugh for the left who would take the fight unapologetically to the Republicans.

But faced with Mr. Moore (and later, Keith Olbermann) they recoil, claiming that kind of aggressiveness is somehow at odds with the notion of being a liberal. In a famous attack, Pauline Kael wrote that ''Roger & Me'' was ''gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing.'' Funny -- none of Rush's listeners ever say that about him.

''I don't think they like a guy who is hovering around 300 pounds and walks around in a ball cap who comes from a factory town and talks like where he comes from,'' Mr. Moore said over lunch in Toronto the day before his premiere here. ''People want to have polite conversation at their wine-and-cheese functions.''

Over lunch Mr. Moore seemed more than polite enough. In private conversation he speaks slowly and softly, broken up by an occasional Fat Albert laugh. Wearing a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt under a dark jacket, his head bowed over his plate of pasta, he could pass for a kindly Jesuit, even while trying to dab at the tomato sauce spilled down his front.